German Jewish Émigrés and US Invention

Abstract

Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized US science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the United States, we compare changes in patenting by US inventors in research fields of émigrés with fields of other German chemists. Patenting by US inventors increased by 31 percent in émigré fields. Regressions which instrument for émigré fields with pre-1933 fields of dismissed German chemists confirm a substantial increase in US invention. Inventor-level data indicate that émigrés encouraged innovation by attracting new researchers to their fields, rather than by increasing the productivity of incumbent inventors. (JEL J15, L65, N62, O31, O34)

Do social interactions in the workplace lead to productivity spillover among co-workers?

“…Similarly, very high quality co-authors and collaborators influence individual research output in medical sciences and mathematics positively [9], [10]. Conversely, at a wider geographical level, the large influx of Soviet mathematicians to the US in the 1990s strongly reduced the output of American mathematicians working in similar fields as the Soviet mathematicians [10], and there seems to have been no positive knowledge spillover of German Jewish scientists who emigrated to the US in the 1930s on individual US inventors working in similar fields [11].…”

The wider economic impacts of high-skilled migrants: a survey of the literature for receiving countries

“…Borjas and Doran (2012a) examine how the arrival of mathematicians from the former Soviet Union affected the publications and career trajectories of their US counterparts, finding little evidence of aggregate increases in knowledge but strong evidence of native crowding out, both in terms of subject shifts and exits from the field 6 . Moser et al (2012) examine the effect of Jewish chemists exiled from Nazi Germany on patenting in US chemistry. They uncover evidence of substantial crowding-in, with émigré presence leading to a 30% increase in US native patenting between 1920 and 1970.…”

Economics of Immigration: A Case for the United States

“…The role of immigrant-innovators in the long-run economic growth from historical perspective has been studied by several researchers (Karr and Karr, 2016;Nunn et al 2017;Rodrigues-Pose et al 2014;Akcigit et al 2017aAkcigit et al , 2017band Moser et al 2014). Akcigit et al (2017a) used county and state level patent license data as a measure of innovation and linked it to long-run economic growth using U.S. Census data from 1880 to1940.…”